1 lacking in reality or substance or genuineness;
not corresponding to acknowledged facts or criteria; "ghosts and
other unreal entities"; "unreal propaganda serving as news" [ant:
real]

2 not actually such; being or seeming fanciful or
imaginary; "this conversation is getting more and more unreal";
"the fantastically unreal world of government bureaucracy"; "the
unreal world of advertising art" [ant: real(a)]

One official bonus pack was released by Epic Games
called Fusion Map Pack. It can be downloaded from the internet for
free.

Unreal Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali was
released on May 31, 1999, and added new
missions to the single player campaign of Unreal. Unreal and Unreal
Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali would later be bundled together
as Unreal Gold. Additionally, the games were updated to run on the
Unreal
Tournament version of the game engine. This compilation was
only published in North
America.

Plot

The player takes on the part of Prisoner 849, an
otherwise anonymous persona aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex
Rikers. The ship crash-lands on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali,
home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids.
The Nali and their planet have been subjugated by the Skaarj, a race of
brutish yet technologically advanced reptilian humanoids. Skaarj
troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining
survivors, save for Prisoner 849, who manages to arm himself and
escape from the ship.

The planet Na Pali is rich in Tarydium, an exotic
crystal that possesses a high energy yield, whose utility is the
reason for which the Skaarj have invaded. The ship has crashed near
one of the many Tarydium mines and processing facilities that the
Skaarj have built. Prisoner 849 travels through the mines, meeting
Nali slaves and eventually entering the ruins of Nali villages and
cities, where the extent of the Nali's suffering and exploitation
are made clear.

Throughout the game the player stumbles across
the remains of other humans, often with electronic journals that
detail their last days and hint at the cause of their demise.
Usually the tales are of desperate struggles to hide from the
Skaarj or other bloodthirsty inhabitants of the planet.

Prisoner 849 continues to make his way through a
series of alien installations, crashed spaceships, and ancient Nali
temples infested with Skaarj troops and their minions, eventually
arriving at the Nali Castle. Inside the castle, the player locates
a teleporter that leads to the Skaarj Mothership. The mothership
proves to be a vast labyrinth, but Prisoner 849 manages to find the
ship's reactor and destroys it, plunging the vessel into darkness.
After navigating the corridors in the dark, the player arrives at
the Skaarj Queen's chamber and kills her. Prisoner 849 jumps into
an escape pod as the mothership disintegrates. Although the
prisoner survives the Skaarj, the escape pod is left to float into
space, with slim hopes of being found.

Novels

Two novels
titled Hard Crash and Prophet's Power were published, expanding on
the premise and story first introduced in Unreal. After the release
of the two novels, both of the covers were accidentally switched,
making it harder for readers to understand what happened in the
story.

Expansion plot

The story picks up not long after Unreal's
ending; Prisoner 849 is found by a human warship, the UMS Bodega
Bay. Upon learning of the prisoner's identity, the military
conscripts him into service, forcing the prisoner to return to Na
Pali in order to locate the downed ship UMS Prometheus. There, the
prisoner is to retrieve some secret weapons research.

Upon arriving at the Prometheus, Prisoner 849
finds the secret weapons log, but the ship's radio broadcasts a
transmission from the Bodega Bay, exposing the military's
treachery. As Prisoner 849 transmits the research log, a squad of
marines beam onboard the ship, intending to eliminate the prisoner.
However, the prisoner manages to escape into a nearby mine
system.

Once again, Prisoner 849 is forced to traverse
through a series of alien facilities and Nali temples in an attempt
to locate another way off the planet. Eventually the prisoner ends
up at another Nali Castle, where a small spacecraft is being
stored. After fighting his way through the Skaarj, the prisoner
manages to take off in the spacecraft. However, the Bodega Bay is
waiting in orbit, and launches a missile at the prisoner's ship.
The prisoner outmaneuvers the missile, and leads it back on a
collision course with the Bodega Bay. The large ship is disabled by
the ensuing blast, and Prisoner 849 escapes into space.

Development

The Unreal game engine
was seen as a major rival to id Software's
id Tech
2 engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be
technically superior to Quake II, which
was out on the market at the same time (between December1997 and May1998). Originally,
Unreal was going to be a Quake-style shooter—earlier screens showed
a large status bar and centered weapons, similar to Doom and
Quake.

As development progressed, various levels were
cut from development. A few of these levels reappeared in the
Return to Na Pali expansion pack. A number of enemies from early
versions are present in the released software but with variations
and improvements to their look. One monster that didn't make the
cut was a dragon. The main character was going to be a woman,
however in the final version the main character's gender is
selectable in the game's "player setup" screen, though the default
is a female character named Gina. One of the weapons shown in early
screenshots was the "Quadshot"—a four-barreled shotgun. The model
remains in-game, while there is no code for the weapon to function.
Another weapon shown was a different pistol, however this may have
just been an early version of the Automag. At one point the rifle
could fire three shots at once, which is wrongly stated as the
alternate fire in the Unreal manual that comes with the Unreal
Anthology.

Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting
language called UnrealScript,
it soon developed a large community on the Internet which was
able to add new mods
(short for "modifications") in order to change or enhance gameplay.
This feature greatly added to the overall longevity of the product
and provided an incentive for new development. A map editor and
overall complete modification program called UnrealEd also came
with the package. Epic Games has
encouraged its community to contribute to creating modifications
through sponsoring big dollar contests, including one for Unreal
Tournament for $150,000 in cash and prizes, and another for Unreal
Tournament 2004 for $1,000,000 in cash and prizes.

Graphics

Unreal is known for boosting the expectations of
3D graphics considerably. Compared to its peers in the genre, such
as Quake
II, Unreal brought to life not only highly-detailed indoor
environments, but also easily the most impressive outdoor
landscapes ever seen at the time. This graphical splendor brought
with it the side effect of requiring powerful hardware to run the
game fast enough to enjoy. The minimum requirements stated that a
Pentium 166
MHz with a mere 16 MB RAM and no 3D accelerator would be
capable of running the game. This was not realistic, however, and
many gamers were very disappointed when they tried to play the game
with such a system.

The Unreal engine brought a host of graphical
improvements, including colored lighting. Although Unreal is not
the first major release with colored lighting (see Quake II), it is
the first to have a software
renderer as feature rich as the hardware renderers of the time,
including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture
filtering referred to by programmer
Tim Sweeney as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither.
Early pre-release versions of Unreal were based entirely around
software rendering. SIMD technology is
integral to allowing the software audio and 3D graphics engines to
perform as well as they do. Unreal uses several SIMD technologies,
including AMD's 3DNow! along with
Intel's MMX
and SSE
(known as "KNI—Katmai New Instructions" within Unreal).

Unreal was one of the first games to utilize
detail texturing. This type of multiple texturing enhances the
surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material
detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most
surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface
appear much more complex (high-resolution)
instead of becoming increasingly blurry. Notable surfaces with
these special detail textures included computer monitors and pitted
metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, and golden metal doors and
stone surfaces within Nali temples. This extra texture layer was
not applied to character models. The resulting simulation of
material detail on game objects was intended to aid the player's
suspension
of disbelief. For many years after Unreal's release (and Unreal
Tournament's release), detail texturing only worked well with the
Glide
renderer. It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by
default (but could be re-enabled in the Unreal.ini file) due to
performance and quality issues caused by the driver and present
even on hardware many times more powerful than the original
3Dfx
Voodoo Graphics.

Because of Unreal's long development time, the
course of development occurred during the emergence and rapid
progression of hardware 3D accelerators. So, along with the
advanced software 3D renderer, Unreal was built to take advantage
of the 3Dfx Glide
API, which emerged as the dominant interface towards the end of
the game's development. When Unreal was finally released,
Microsoft's Direct3D API was
growing almost exponentially in popularity and Epic was fairly
quick to develop a renderer for their game engine. However, the
Direct3D renderer, released initially to support the new Matrox G200,
was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in
the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics
quality issues. The Glide renderer's superiority can be seen in a
review of the 3dfx Voodoo 5, where
it outperformed every other card in Unreal
Tournament (same engine as Unreal), due to its native Glide
support. Even video cards
which consistently defeated the Voodoo 5 5500 in other games could
not win against Glide's greater efficiency. Unreal also had
official OpenGL support, but
its compatibility was very limited due to poor OpenGL client
drivers from most hardware vendors at the time and Epic's resulting
disinterest in furthering development. OpenGL could perform better
in some rare situations, but Glide and Direct3D were usually the
APIs of choice.

Sound effects

Unreal's "Galaxy" audio system is highly
optimized for speed and quality, utilizing Intel's MMX
extensively. It manages both music and sound effects. For sound
effects it uses uncompressed waveforms in 8-bit or 16-bit monaural
format. The engine is capable of playing back at all common
sample
rates but is set by default to 22 kHz playback to
reduce CPU load on computers available at the time of release. One
can change the unreal.ini file's sample rate setting to
44.1 kHz ("44100" in the file) and receive a boost in
quality for both music and effects.

Galaxy supports rudimentary software-based 3D
audio positioning as well as hardware 3D sound support (although
this is quite buggy). In software mode, sounds are only
stereo-panned. Phase
shifting and band-pass
filtering are used to imitate changes in position and distance.
The sound system is limited to mixing and playing back a maximum of
64 channels, but the default is 16 channels because of CPU power
limitations. This option is also user configurable within the
unreal.ini file.

In hardware 3D audio mode, the engine is designed
to support sound cards
with hardware 3D
audio mixing and positioning capabilities. At the time of
release this included primarily the Aureal
Vortex line of audio cards. In this mode, the sound card takes over
sound placement with the game providing only positional information
to the hardware. If the game uses more channels than the sound card
supports, then the extra channels will be run on the game's
software engine; this can cause sound consistency problems.

If the processor Unreal is running on lacks MMX
support (i.e. a Pentium Pro),
then the game will automatically reduce sound quality to low.
Quality can be turned back up to full, but the audio engine is less
efficient without MMX support. On non-MMX machines, the sound code
does make some quality and speed trade-offs by limiting sound
effects to having only 64 volume levels. This limitation can be
heard by setting up an ambient sound effect with a high radius in
an otherwise quiet area; the discrete steps between volume levels
are quite audible. Epic also noted nearly a twofold speed boost
with MMX code.

Reception

Upon release, Unreal was praised for not only for
its graphics and environments, but also for above-average AI and
gameplay. Enemies would dodge out of the way of projectiles, and
pose a competent threat as well. Headshots would do more damage as
well, and the player could even decapitate enemies with weapons
such as the Razorjack and the Sniper rifle. The planet of Na Pali
was rich in atmosphere compared to many other FPS out at the
time—outdoor levels were populated by many small creatures and
birds, who did not attack the player. Its engine was considered
revolutionary at the time, boasting huge environments and colourful
lighting available in software as well as hardware-accelerated
mode.

Map editing

Unreal's method of creating maps differs in
major ways from that of Quake. The bundled UnrealEd map
editor uses the Unreal engine to accurately render the exact scene,
as opposed to external editors like Worldcraft
attempting to recreate it with different methods. Whereas Quake
maps are compiled from a variety of different components, Unreal
maps are inherently editable on the fly. This allows anybody to
edit any map that is created, including the originals from the
developers. Though UnrealEd loads quite a bit slower than most map
editors, it runs maps smoothly and swiftly: hitting rebuild
automatically finalizes the level within minutes (or even within
seconds, on a modern day computer), as opposed to the hours or (at
the time) even days with a full Quake map compile.

In addition, Unreal starts with a completely
solid world in which the user extract areas with primitives instead
of starting with a void and building rooms by adding primitive
shapes to fill it. Many map designers believe that this eliminates
the tedium of matching up separate walls, floors and
ceilings.

Unreal for Linux and Mac OS

The Mac OS version of the game was only ever
updated to version 224b. Westlake Interactive, the company
responsible for the port, gave the reason for not continuing to
update the game as being due to lack of contractual obligations and
the fact they were doing it in their free time, as well as not
being able to keep up with the PC version's patch cycle.
Contradictorily they stated the PC 225 patch was never supplied to
them and then that was later modified into version 226 which was
never cleaned up enough to be released, yet 226 was later released
as the final patch for Unreal on Windows. If this was a just a
oversight on their part, or a deliberate attempt to make an excuse
not to continue to update the game is unknown.http://web.archive.org/web/20030301132805/www.westlakeinteractive.com/unrealstatus.html
As a result, the Mac OS version remains at 224b and as such is
largely incompatible with a variety of third party maps and
modifications built for the PC version 226f. Network play is also
incompatible between the two versions. Unreal can, however, be
played with the "oldskool" modification on Unreal
Tournament, thus enabling most third-party maps and
modifications created for Unreal.

A Mac OS X
version was never created as support for the game was halted before
one ever came about, but there has since been a modification
created using a hacked Unreal Tournament preview 3 binary, and thus
has no music, but nonetheless runs natively in OS X. http://mac.lowetechlabs.com/?p=28